This invention is related to a toy camera which is capable of ejecting a plate from its interior and includes a braking mechanism which limits the force with which the plate is ejected while concurrently depositing a thin film of water on the plate.
Many toy cameras have been designed and sold which visually mimic a real camera but which unfortunately do nothing more than simply click if their shutter button is depressed. In order to more closely mimic a real camera improvements have been made in toy cameras which actually dispense a perforated roll of pictures simulating the positive picture eventually obtainable from a real camera.
Since the rolls of perforated paper used in this type of camera all have a predetermined set of designs located in a predetermined order, the child who uses such a toy camera while actually getting the effect of having a developed picture must accept whatever picture is next in line on the roll. If the child is taking a pretend picture of his friend and the picture of a landscape is next in line, of course, the realism of the picture is lacking.
An improved form of this type of toy camera is one wherein instead of a preformed roll a series of plates are used for the pictures. This type of picture mimics the typical Polaroid type picture and has the advantage of allowing the child to prearrange the order of the pictures such that the child can, for example, pretend to take the picture of a person and in effect have a preformed picture of a person actually dispensed from the toy camera.
It is considered that the above noted type camera would be improved if before insertion into the camera the preformed picture were covered or hidden such that the design on its surface was not viewable but in fact appeared to be an empty or blank piece of film. Japanese patents Nos. 49-130913 and 50-5097 describe certain membranes which can be overlaid over a picture and when these membranes are moistened with water they change from being opaque to being transparent. If the preformed picture used in a toy camera were covered with a membrane of this nature it is considered that this would add an exciting degree of realism to a child playing with a toy camera incorporating a film which only showed an image after it was dispensed from a camera.